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For a Gymnastics Family, a Longtime Vision Is in Reach

Danell Leyva led qualifying in the all-around event and also helped pull the United States men’s team to the top of the standings.Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

LONDON — In the aisle behind the lower bowl of the gymnastics venue, running around like an overcaffeinated madman shouting, “Vamos!” and “That’s my boy!” is a man who helped Danell Leyva become one of the medal favorites.

While Leyva competed in qualifying Saturday, even when hiding under his lucky green towel to shut himself off from the world, he could hear that man cry out, “You’re the best, baby!”

And those words, as usual, made Leyva believe it.

“Everybody thinks it’s an embarrassment because he acts so crazy, but it’s actually a big help,” Leyva said of his stepfather and coach, Yin Alvarez, who is known for his antics at meets. “I love hearing him. I love his energy and passion. I feed off of it. It definitely makes me better.”

Leyva, 20, who came to the United States from Cuba when he was a toddler, led qualifying in the all-around event and also helped pull the United States men’s team to the top of the standings.

None of those scores carry over to Monday’s final. But to Leyva, that does not matter. He still has extra confidence going into the biggest week of his life, a week that he and Alvarez have been envisioning for years.

Alvarez said he first dreamed of opening a gym and coaching an Olympian when he was a boy in Cuba, a country he knew would never let him reach that goal.

“I was a dreaming person, and people that dream, there’s no room for them in Cuba, so you feel dead and more dead because you know things aren’t going to get better,” Alvarez said. “That’s something me and Dani have similar. Even though he’s not my real biological kid, we dream the same.”

The seeds of their Olympic hopes were planted when Alvarez and Leyva’s mother, Maria Gonzalez, attended a Cuban sports school together, leaving their families as children so they could train for Castro’s national team.

Alvarez already had boundless energy and was a troublemaker, once spraying an entire classroom with fire extinguisher foam. Gonzalez was a prim goody-goody who rolled her eyes at Alvarez’s pranks.

When their gymnastics careers ended, their lives diverged. Alvarez joined a gymnastics troupe that traveled internationally. Gonzalez coached in Cuba and had two children.

Alvarez could not shake those pesky Olympic dreams from his head. So on a trip to Mexico, on Jan. 15, 1992, at about 4:30 a.m., he stole out of his hotel and headed for the Rio Grande. He stuffed his clothes in a plastic bag and braved the freezing water to swim to the United States — toward a place where he knew no one and to a life filled with scary unknowns and thrilling possibilities.

“I always wanted to have my own gym,” Alvarez said. “So that was pushing me to swim faster and faster.”

Back home, Gonzalez was facing the struggles of an average Cuban. In the sports school, she was given everything: food, shelter, medical care. Outside of it, she discovered that she had long had it easy.

The recurring power outages were not the worst part; Danell’s asthma was. She often could not obtain medicine for him because the hospitals were out of it.

“I was so sad and frightened because Dani got sick so many, many times I thought he would die,” she said. “I knew I had to leave Cuba.”

Her father had fled to Miami two years earlier and had told her to send him a telegram saying, “Everything is perfect,” if she wanted to leave Cuba because the government often monitored correspondence. So she took the leap.

Photo

As Danell Leyva competed Saturday in qualifying for Monday’s team all-around gymnastics final, his stepfather, Yin Alvarez, showed his usual exuberance from the stands.Credit
Brian Snyder/Reuters

Because Gonzalez was a respected gymnastics coach, she was able to take Danell and his sister Dayanis to Peru to coach there. She soon sneaked away to Venezuela, then Ecuador, then Nicaragua until she secured a way to the United States.

When Danell was barely 2, she boarded a plane for Miami, though she did not have official papers to do so. Upon arrival, she avoided penalty because Danell had been so ill.

When she and Alvarez finally reconnected, he had already saved money by washing dishes, cleaning bathrooms and selling cemetery plots to buy gymnastics equipment. He took her to a storage facility where he kept the gear.

Leyva hardly sat still back then, but he was mesmerized by the high-flying moves.

“I said I want to do that,” Leyva said. “I don’t know what it is, but I want to be that.”

His mother scoffed at the idea, saying he was too chubby, that his arms were too long, his feet were too flat and his backside was too big. His asthma also was not a good fit for the gym, where chalk dust floats like pollen in springtime.

“She actually took me to a class and coach was like, I can’t deal with this kid; please don’t bring him back,” Leyva said, laughing. “That was exactly the time Yin opened his gym. Since then, I’ve been with him and he’s put up with me.”

Leyva might not have had the body type, but he had the heart to train, said Alvarez, who had opened Universal Gymnastics in Homestead, south of Miami. That training led Leyva to a national title in the all-around and a world title on parallel bars. All along, Alvarez, who married Gonzalez in 2001, has been at his side.

When Leyva performs, Alvarez shadows his routines on the sideline. He sways as if using an invisible hula hoop and flails his arms as if shooing a fly. It is just part of his routine during Leyva’s routine.

Alvarez blesses himself and blows the good wishes to Leyva, then to the heavens. Then he claps several times when Leyva is finishing a routine — his clap, clap then clap, clap, clap has become so well known that fans now join in.

Whether Leyva has performed spectacularly or spectacularly badly, Alvarez always leaps for joy and spins around, then sprints backward while pumping his fist. On Saturday, he yelled, “That’s it!” in Spanish from the stands, and it echoed throughout the arena. (At the Olympics, only the team coaches for each competing nation are allowed on the floor.)

“I think Cuban people get more excited than everybody else because we’re very emotional,” Alvarez said. “In Cuba, you can’t say things like: ‘I want Castro out! We’re hungry! There’s no freedom!’ But you can say anything else. And we do!”

Leyva said he has heard his father say it all, joking that Alvarez might just be the loudest Cuban ever. He insisted, though, that he is just as much of a showman and would like to work in entertainment someday.

“I want to do musicals, acting, Broadway, everything,” Leyva said. He noted that only a few people have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. “My goal is to join that group.”

For now, though, he and Alvarez share the same goal: an Olympic gold medal. Leyva said winning one would be his way of repaying his family for the sacrifices they made for him.

While Leyva remained stoic on the competition floor Saturday, Alvarez showed emotion for both of them. After Leyva nailed a daring high bar routine, Alvarez stormed down the stairs of the stands, shouting, “I love you, baby!” Some fans laughed at his exuberance. Leyva flashed a meek smile.

“We’re both huge goofballs, but when it comes down to work, we switch on that focus,” Leyva said. “I inherited my fight from him. Nothing can break us.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 30, 2012, on Page D7 of the New York edition with the headline: For a Gymnastics Family, A Longtime Vision Is in Reach. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe